Keeping the Women we Love Healthy

Just last month we heard Dr. Sears talk about the negative impact of sedentary behavior and nutrition in the presentation ' Simple Lifestyle Changes for Improving Women's Health' ; where research on diet and sedentary behaviors opened our eyes to important risk factors in cardiovascular disease, diabetes and cancer. With obesity being characterized now as a national epidemic , it is becoming imperative that we do revise our lifestyle and most importantly, change it.  As to whether it is simple or not, that depends on the lens under which you are seeing the issue. Whenever someone prefaces any sentence with 'simple' there is an expectation of effortless actions.  Many times our lives will depend on those changes to maintain our health, but  'simple' ? The idea is to create a series of healthy lifestyle 'habits' to improve and sustain our health, as difficult as it might sound!  The National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney Diseases created th...

Dr. Dorothy Sears, Associate Professor of Medicine from UCSD came to speak at the Howell Foundation's luncheon last May with pretty interesting research on 2 key concerns and how they, for sure, improve or undermine our health: intermittent fasting and sedentary behavior. Turns out our parents were right: Eat your fruits and vegetables and exercise!  With the just released information from the CDC regarding the obesity epidemic in the US --now at 40% for women-- it is more than clear that type 2 diabetes, cancer and cardiovascular disease are also on the rise.  The benefits of a lifestyle makeover are clear: not only does it help to improve our health and reduce the risks of a life-changing disease, but also minimizes the adverse effects of medication while promoting healthy aging. One of the largest studies conducted throughout a 20-year span followed over 3000 participants with pre-diabetic conditions.  Individuals were divided into 2 groups; one would be charact...

FACT:  1 in 3 women will get cancer in her lifetime.   Whatever the statistics, the encouraging news is that cancer diagnosis in women is declining. According to this year's "Cancers Facts and Figures" published by the American Cancer Society, d eath rates have been declining in men and women since the early 1990s. From 1991 to 2011, the combined death rate dropped 22%. Over the past 5 years (2007 to 2011), the death rate for all cancers combined decreased by 1.8% per year in men and 1.4% per year in women (1) . But what are the most diagnosed cancers in men and women?  Recent news highlights the encouraging discoveries of cures for patients with cancer--  by women for women -- some  examples are listed below, but you can read all about it in the original source  here   (2) .  Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., director of the breast cancer program at the Duke Cancer Institute in Durham, North Carolina, is researching a targeted drug which d...